Word: tableaux
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...cultural past. Osaka native Yasumasa Morimura, for example, places himself as the main character in carefully staged and photographed "reproductions" of well-known Western paintings like Manet's Olympia. Tomiaki Yamamoto melds brushy abstract expressionism with the pattern-oriented design sensibility of traditional Japanese textiles. Often his splashy tableaux resemble spread-out kimonos. Typically, as in Untitled, 1985, they are covered with an obsessive, all-over rash of heavily impastoed, drippy dots. Far less theatrical but also keenly focused on subject matter and technique, sculptor Katsura Funakoshi creates blank-faced portraits of everyday people whose looks betray neither race...
...times Dead Ringers also tilts out of coherence, with scenes that are dramatically stillborn. But Irons is splendid in both roles, and Cronenberg can create tour-de-force tableaux with his effortless black magic. In one, Bev strides into surgery dressed in red, like a demon priest at a sacrificial rite. The victim is woman; her crime is woman's unique advantage over man, the power to produce perfect new bodies from the most vulnerable part of her own. Any mad scientist, any man, can try either to serve that power or to destroy it. And Bev must finally love...
...does say something important about a person's character if he hasn't lived his life in accordance with his professed values. And it obviously tests his commitment to those values as well. That's why the political-robotics technicians of both parties expend so much energy staging tableaux of loving family life, though strictly speaking the number of one's children, grandchildren and household pets is irrelevant in evaluating one's views on federal day care...
...immigrants and Cuban Marielitos are among the supporting victims and sleaze artists in a multiplot story featuring a ruthless but effective cop whose beat is long- unsolved murders. A.E. Maxwell's equally colorful Just Enough Light to Kill (Doubleday; 254 pages; $16.95) blends Soviet high-tech espionage with striking tableaux of Latin American immigrants paying a few hundred dollars to be herded like cattle across the U.S. border and Hong Kong Chinese anteing up thousands to be ferried door to door...
There are cinematic scene shifts, striking tableaux and, too late to help, affecting moments for Macduff and the wife and son whom he unknowingly abandons to their murder. At the end, Macbeth and Macduff duel in silhouette, then tumble behind a row of soldiers, so there is momentary doubt about who felled whom. But surely almost everyone knows the plot: such pseudo surprise is no substitute for the deeper astonishment of fresh insight into two of the great archetypes in world drama...